It has been an interesting week what with the development of a potential pandemic. I don’t discount that the situation is potentially very serious but it is being exacerbated by the rise in self proclaimed experts. I was speaking with an emergency planning officer today, and their greatest concern is not their ability to respond to a potential [...]
Total Quality Management is a process-oriented system built on the belief that controlling quality is not a central function but should permeate the entire organisation. Business Continuity is similar in the need to embed itself within the culture of the organisation. In an analysis published by the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) they stated [...]
Business continuity practitioners are in reality system designers who develop, realise and maintain a business continuity management system. The difficulty facing any system designer is that the stake-holders will tend to demand much from the system while requiring it to be easy to use. This is clearly a difficult set of requirements to deliver. In [...]
Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with a Director of a Continuity Services company. While we were discussing the continuity process he started to speak in more detail about his own real world experiences of disaster recovery and business continuity. During this discussion he confirmed a principle that I have been riffing on for [...]
Sometimes when speaking to business continuity practitioners you can be forgiven for thinking that the whole process is an exercise is ticking boxes and generating documents. Unfortunately, confusing the process and its products with the end goal will inevitably fail to deliver the expected result. The expected result and therefore the goal is of course [...]
The industry has been fairly supportive of the new British Standard for Business Continuity Management, BS-25999. That is as it should be as the standard is a significant step forward in raising the profile of business continuity and best practise. However, there is a belief held by some business continuity managers that one of their [...]